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This special issue builds up on the special theme of the workshop 'TextGraphs-4: Graph-based Algorithms for NLP' that is going to be held on 7th August 2009 in conjunction with ACL-IJCNLP 2009. The special theme of TextGraphs-4 is 'Models of Social and Cognitive Dynamics of Languages in the Framework of Complex Networks'. While some of the articles shall be directly chosen from the TextGraphs-4 submissions, we can still accommodate around four to five fresh submissions in the special issue. Please treat this call as an open invitation to submit to this special issue.

Cognitive dynamics of languages include topics focused primarily on language acquisition, which can be extended to language change (historical linguistics) and language evolution. Since the latter phenomena are also governed by social factors, we can further classify them under social dynamics of languages. In addition, social dynamics of languages also include topics such as mining the social networks of blogs and emails. The special issue will contain work that investigates any of the aforementioned phenomena using graph theory or complex networks as a tool. Example topics include, but are not limited to:

* Lexical acquisition and growth of the mental lexicon

* Phonological, syntactic and semantic acquisition

* Lexical change

* Applications of networks in modeling language variation and dialectometry